Water and wastewater operations are said to be secure professions not vulnerable to being outsourced or automated out of existence.
For decades we watched jobs of various kinds get shipped overseas or taken over by machines. While careers like computer programming, engineering, accounting and graphic design were outsourced to India and China, operations seemed safe so long as whole treatment plants couldn’t be transported across the ocean.
The New World
Then along came AI. Run an internet search on “artificial intelligence wastewater operator” and you’ll find a long list of articles on how AI can help: with nutrient reduction, aeration efficiency, upset prevention, energy savings, asset management, disinfection, resource recovery, even facility design.
One article states, “From holistic plant management and advanced predictive analytics to intelligent automation and enhanced resource recovery, AI promises to drive innovation and sustainability in wastewater treatment, ensuring cleaner water and a healthier environment for future generations.”
Where does that leave you as an operations professional? Are operators destined to become mere assistants to AI robots? Instead of analyzing data, making decisions and adjusting process setpoints to optimize treatment, will you become merely a checker of suggestions spat out by mysterious algorithms?
A Dose of Empathy
I ask this as someone who thought my own career as a writer was safe. After all, no one in a low-wage, non-English-speaking Asian country could match my fluency and feel for language, built over a lifetime. Right? And surely no machine could master such a complex, nuanced skill as writing. Could it?
Then AI and large language models arrived. Now a simple internet search on “artificial intelligence writing” brings up numerous resources I presumably could use to do my job faster, or better, or both.
In my search I found: Compose bold, clear, mistake-free writing. Improve grammar, punctuation and conciseness. Write essays and reports fast. Powerful writing in seconds. No more writer’s block. Generate high-quality content for blogs, articles, websites and social media. Create, edit and polish text. All that and more, on just the first page of results.
Where’s the Pride?
Already I am told of writers like me who have lost their jobs, or lost clients, because companies found it cheaper to have AI generate material and let lower-level people simply fact-check and edit instead of paying experienced professionals to write articles from scratch.
AI writing has its issues now but will likely get much better, and with incredible speed. So is my career at risk? Am I reaching retirement age at a most opportune time, able to get out on my own terms, with my dignity and financial picture intact? Will humans no longer be unique in the ability, as a writer friend put it, “to send words marching down the page in strict military order”?
And what about operators? Much is written about what AI can do. It is a lot harder to find information about how it will affect operators. Where’s the pride in a career where decisions traditionally made by people all of a sudden are made by computer software?
The Survey Said…
I did turn up a report on a survey conducted in Europe to measure how well wastewater treatment professionals would accept AI. It was conducted by DARROW, a consortium aiming to build a data-driven AI solution to optimize resource recovery from wastewater by making treatment plants more autonomous and energy efficient.
Most respondents — people directly involved in operations — were already familiar with AI systems that give suggestions or make automated decisions in treatment plants. The study found that operators’ confidence in and enjoyment of AI were lower where the technology was more autonomous; that is, with less human interaction.
“These systems were less likely to be adopted,” and so “finding a balance between automation and human oversight is crucial,” the report said. Black-box algorithms fostered mistrust because users found it “challenging to understand the rationale behind recommendations.”
In summary, here are some key factors that, according to the study, encourage trust in AI:
- Transparency. Clear communication on how AI makes recommendations and the data it uses.
- Accuracy and consistency. Accurate recommendations over time foster users’ trust and confidence.
- Explainability. Showing the factors that lead to decisions, and letting users see how the AI model works, were seen as critical to operators’ trust.
- Collaboration. Trust is enhanced when users are involved in developing the AI solution and can give feedback.
Visit wastewater.ai/user-acceptance-of-ai-in-wastewater-treatment/ to learn more about the study.
In the meantime, what are your attitudes toward AI? How do you see it fitting into the world of plant operations, and how do you see it affecting your career and job satisfaction? Send your comments to editor@tpomag.com. We will share the results with our readership.
